Bleak Expectations is a British radio show that parodies the works of Charles Dickens, such as Bleak House, Great Expectations and many more. The radio show’s main character is called Pip and he has two sisters, Poppy and Pippa, and plays around with many of the classic themes Dickens covered in many of his novels, such as childhood traumas and oppressive schooling. You can listen to an episode online here.
A painting of a young Dickens on his first trip to America by Francis Alexander.
(Professor Snape?!)
View high resolution
A Pickwick postcard drawn by A. Ludovici in 1906. One of the many pieces of Pickwick merchandise that arose after the great success of the stories. This one depicts Pickwick getting a kiss from a young lady, presumably a scene from The Wardles’ house. There were tons of illustrations, postcards and other merchandise created around the stories of Dickens and they show how popular and influential his works became.
Mr. Toots and the Game Chicken from Dombey and Son! This is pretty awesome, I wish I knew who drew it.
View high resolution
A map of Dickens’ London circa 1850 showing his home in relation to the surrounding burroughs. If you follow this link you can click on the different areas to see how they are relevant to his novels and stories!
In his Dictionary of British Literary Characters, John R. Greenfield writes that Charles Dickens created 989 specific (named) characters during his career. This link will bring you to an alphabetical list of characters by name, with descriptions and illustrations for many of them, along with the story or novel where they appeared. I looked up a few characters that I found interesting and ended up coming across some really hilarious names while I was surfing around. Among my favorite character names were: Anne Chickenstalker, Canon Crisparkle and Mary Peerybingle. Dickens certainly had a knack for inventing memorable names, which you can explore at this link!
This is a really neat “article” that shows the progression toward the eventual Futurist movement through examples of 18th and 19th century literature and art from the awesome blog HTMLGiant. While there is no explicit commentary on the progression toward futurism, the excerpts from literature and art and music stand alone in demonstrating the changes in society that eventually led to the futurist movement. The reason I’m including it on this blog is because there is an excerpt from Dickens’ Bleak House that shows how society was changing from the country lifestyle to the rise of dirty, busy cities and fast-paced lifestyles. Dickens obviously doesn’t expound the ideas of the futurists (in fact, his beliefs seem completely antithetical to futurist thought), but his writing does give insight into the circumstances that caused the emergence of the movement. It’s a really interesting progression shown through literature, art and music used as primary sources and you should definitely check it out!
I was reading about the parallels between Mr. Pickwick and Don Quixote in this great article and it got me thinking about the word, “quixotic”. Both “The Pickwick Papers” and “Don Quixote” are considered to be great quixotic novels, which basically means that they are both about idealistic gentlemen who embark on noble adventures which backfire in silly ways.
The similarity between the name Quixote and the word “quixotic” finally dawned on me as I was reading this article, and reading further, I learned that Don Quixote was the first origin of the word. I’ve always thought the word, “quixotic” was pretty awesome (phonetically and also in Scrabble) and so I was surprised and excited to finally put together this connection.
I was curious to further learn the etymology of the word and so I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary. According to the OED, the first example of the word “quixotic” as an adjective appeared in 1718 when N. Amhurst wrote, “Pulpit and Press ficticious Ills engage, And combat Windmills with Quixotic Rage,” in his book, “Protestant Popery’.
Pretty neat! My next endeavor is to see if Dickens ever used the word in any of his writings, so stay tuned.
Sources:
Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Online, http://personales.ya.com/quijotepickwick/English.html
